Articles

When I refer to the top 3 coins I am categorizing them by market cap. You can go here and see exactly what I am talking about for those who need a little visual.

First and foremost sorry for the long-awaited article! For me to talk about something when nothing was happening is similar to TMZ always trying to make news out of trash. So after a little hibernation, it seems that something mild happened in the crpytocurrency market and now everybody is back on the train. A sea of green can be seen on coinmarketcap.com, and that in and of itself drives up the hype and ultimately whatever initial spark drove up the price – drives it up even more artificially.

A quick run through the top 3 coins…

Bitcoin (BTC) – $9,164.15

Now shot down by a spokesperson for Barclays, Barclays had catered to the idea of opening up a trading desk for cryptocurrency. Similar to Goldman Sachs, which had stated the same thing a couple of weeks ago, the idea of opening up such a trading desk would be considered too soon in my opinion. With Bitcoin being almost 10 years old and still considered in its early stages – we have a little ways to go until big banks begin to really take crypto serious. Although not too long! With a high demand for cryptocurrency in our daily lives, big institutions have to speed up integration of blockchain if they want to stay in touch with the new reality of life.

On a technical note, Bitcoin has seen a price increase of 34.03% since April 12th. With a circulating supply of 16,995,700 – Bitcoin is nearing its total supply of 21,000,000 which can only mean that the demand should exponentially increase. As the former statement seemed to be more of a blanket statement – it is important to know that once all 21,000,000 coins are mined that the price may or may not increase to the highs that we are all hoping for. Reason being? One thought is that who will continue to keep the miners running if there is no more incentive to waste all that energy? Of course that is just one thought, if anything the price could be so high that miners keep running just so they can trade BTC back and forth keeping the price artificially high.

Ethereum (ETH) – $667.43

Going back to March, it was announced that Coinbase would begin to support (or soon support) ERC20 tokens on its exchange. Basically any coins such as Tron, EOS, and OmiseGo could possibly be bought and sold on the Coinbase platform. Good news for any token on the Ethereum blockchain, but you would think Coinbase would focus on trying to get specific coins on the platform (like Ripple for example) instead of throwing out a blanket of possible coins that will people trying to guess which coin is next. Overall, Ethereum has seen a rise of about 68.3% since April 9th which would put it a couple of days after the announcement from Coinbase.

Bad news is around the corner though as Gary Gensler, a former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), stated that he believes Ether and XRP have been issued through unregistered securities offerings and are trading illegally on the hundreds of cryptocurrency exchanges that list them.

Ripple (XRP) $.91

Ripple is the most promising coin out of the three listed in this article. With all the news out about what they plan to do and have done where can I really start? Let’s run through a quick checklist.

Santander One Pay FX employs Ripple’s tool, xCurrent.

Ripple’s Interledger protocol into Apple Pay

MoneyGram, Western Union both have apps that integrate Ripple

Yes, all the points listed above don’t necessarily involve XRP itself, but with XRP of course being related to xCurrent and xVia people will continue to associate the three causing a false rise in price. But why? Why are people causing the price to rise knowing that all the good news coming out of Ripple is not really for XRP? That’s a hard question to answer, but what I can say is that it’s more of a “Ripple effect”… on a serious note – when one company uses xRapid it takes just one more after that to cause more big organizations to follow on and become the possibly new standard for money transfer. A basic and overheard argument, but one that holds true because it’s most likely to occur!